Can someone change the misleading title to part of the subtitle? It is "Less work, same money, more happiness and productivity. As of February 1, 45 companies in Germany are testing a 4-day workweek.", which is much more meaningful. Title makes it sound like there is anything like a concerted effort, whereas these are just 45 random companies. No details on size of those companies, no data on number of employees or f…
"testing a 4-day workweek"
So, it is a 4-day workweek? So how is title misleading?
HN has a character limit, so sometimes titles get changed to fit.
I spent the summer in Berlin and, as an American, was a bit culture shocked by how little time people worked, and how so many people I met bragged about collecting paid time off for reasons they admitted to making up, which the government enforced all employers must allow. As an employer, I'd be afraid of hiring in countries like Germany for an international workforce if that meant I have to have a patchwork of speci…
Working in germany is just not worth it.
For example in this reddit thread(1) someone asked how much you would earn if you work for an us company paying 100 000 dollar per year while living in germany.
At the time the thread was written 100 000 dollar were about 91100 euro.
After taxes and other things like statutory health insurance you would only have 42.276 euro left (and you still need to put money into your securities account for your retirement as the state based pension isn't sufficient anymore due to the aging population).
I spent the summer in Berlin and, as an American, was a bit culture shocked by how little time people worked, and how so many people I met bragged about collecting paid time off for reasons they admitted to making up, which the government enforced all employers must allow. As an employer, I'd be afraid of hiring in countries like Germany for an international workforce if that meant I have to have a patchwork of speci…
>I spent the summer in Berlin and, as an American That's a pretty bad way to get an impression of a whole country. That's like those American tourists visiting only the instagramable parts of Paris and Rome and then say they "saw Europe" lol. Especially that Berlin is basically an American/Expat enclave in Germany where the native Germans are a minority to the point they're annoyed that nobody at cafes, bars and rest…
> Especially that Berlin is basically an American/Expat enclave in Germany where the native Germans are a minority
C'mon, let's not exaggerate, it is 71% of ethnic Germans according to Wikipedia.
Instead of a 4-day workweek how about setting reasonable hiring standards so that hundreds of thousands of people out of work, especially non-native German speakers, have a chance of getting past the job application screen. Most jobs, even in tech, in DE currently require good knowledge of German, and "good" is being interpreted as near-native.
> Most jobs, even in tech, in DE currently require good knowledge of German I mean of course, d'oh!? You say "even" in tech, I'd say especially in tech (or really any job that requires communication in high performing fields) should have high standards for the native language, because good communication is key. Call me old fashioned, but the jobs for people who don't speak the native language (well) are reserved to b…
Except that in the nascent EU single market, the native language is English. Of course you should be fluent in the language of the country in which you work/live, but increasingly this will be less important - assuming that the EU wants any chance of the economies of scale necessary to compete with US/China
The question I think needs answering is why we wouldn't do it. Obviously most people would love to have an extra 52 days a year to themselves to spend with family, do hobbies, handle personal business. Outside of greed or operational commitments, why aren't we doing this?
I always thought that in a highly automated world, reducing the mandated working hours would be the solution to bring prosperity and peace, but there are some obvious problems with that. For example, in a global economy, nations compete with each other, and for developing nations, an average german producing for fewer hours, but consuming the same or even more resources, would be a great competitive advantage. For something like this to truly work I think it would have to be rolled out globally, or certain tariffs would have to be in place against nations that don’t follow the practice - and let’s be honest, certain nations do much worse things today to gain competitive advantage, and really nobody cares, most people love cheap stuff, however morally questionable the source is.
> Most jobs, even in tech, in DE currently require good knowledge of German I mean of course, d'oh!? You say "even" in tech, I'd say especially in tech (or really any job that requires communication in high performing fields) should have high standards for the native language, because good communication is key. Call me old fashioned, but the jobs for people who don't speak the native language (well) are reserved to b…
Except that in the nascent EU single market, the native language is English. Of course you should be fluent in the language of the country in which you work/live, but increasingly this will be less important - assuming that the EU wants any chance of competing with US/China that is.
> assuming that the EU wants any chance of competing with US/China that is
Germany can import/export and trade with everyone outside of Germany without dumbing down their population to people with a vocabulary of 100 words. Cross border trade language may be English, but domestic business language is German.
Flawless communication between team members is important when developing complex products. If my team was primarily comprised of people who only fluently speak German, and we are located in Germany, is it not reasonable for me to set a requirement that new candidates must speak fluent German? Why are you entitled to have people speak your language, when you are the immigrant?
They can speak German, the just can't speak it to a level that would fool a life-long speaker. I work with plenty of engineers who speak English as a second (or even third) language. It's not really an issue.
That's quite a stretch.
I have experienced breakdown in communications due to English not being good enough many, many times.
There's plenty of stories in comments here, about how bad offshore teams are. In most cases it's just a result of poor communications(due to lack of English proficiency). I've had to switch to other languages to explain some basic things about "what the client actually wanted", because of breakdown in communications.
Instead of a 4-day workweek how about setting reasonable hiring standards so that hundreds of thousands of people out of work, especially non-native German speakers, have a chance of getting past the job application screen. Most jobs, even in tech, in DE currently require good knowledge of German, and "good" is being interpreted as near-native.
Flawless communication between team members is important when developing complex products. If my team was primarily comprised of people who only fluently speak German, and we are located in Germany, is it not reasonable for me to set a requirement that new candidates must speak fluent German? Why are you entitled to have people speak your language, when you are the immigrant?
Because it's equally hard to find good workforce here in Germany. Besides, I expect every IT worker to be able to at least understand, if not speak English in a way that two foreigners can understand each other pretty well. How else did you acquire your knowledge? By only falling back to literature in your language? That seems kind of limiting if you are working in IT.
Your "entitlement" argument sounds a bit harsh for me, to be honest.
The problem is that we treat the baseline/status quo as something which is beneficial and anything "less productive" would be where the tradeoffs are. When you say 20% less medical service you might also get 20% more time with your kids/friends/family, 20% more sleep, 20% more reading, &c. People lived with 99% less of all we have not so long ago, surely there is a middle ground. My mom got oranges for christmas, now…
> My mom got oranges for christmas, now anything short of a new smartphone is borderline a war declaration on your offspring And not only that, but we're outraged if the super-computer in our pocket costs more than a few hundred bucks, so we expect our goods to be cheap and therefore workers get very little ( putting aside "corporate greed" and other buzzy words for a moment). Does the 4DWW crowd acknowledge the poin…
I think most don't, but I'm very frugal so it's an easy point to make for me. If we consumed less, bought less useless gadgets, we'd mechanically need to work less
I'm already working 4 days a week, with a 20% pay cut, and not even a great salary to begin with, but I could get by with 2 days with my current lifestyle (if my company allowed it)
People who want to work less and keep everything the same are delusional imho, something's got to give
> Most jobs, even in tech, in DE currently require good knowledge of German I mean of course, d'oh!? You say "even" in tech, I'd say especially in tech (or really any job that requires communication in high performing fields) should have high standards for the native language, because good communication is key. Call me old fashioned, but the jobs for people who don't speak the native language (well) are reserved to b…
Except that in the nascent EU single market, the native language is English. Of course you should be fluent in the language of the country in which you work/live, but increasingly this will be less important - assuming that the EU wants any chance of competing with US/China that is.
It's a single market, not a single country.
There are plenty of companies in Germany that have English as a working language, but even then local teams are better served by people with good local language proficiency.